Alberta Premier Alison Redford

Uh-oh! Lucy van Pelt is back and she’s brought her football.

She’ll be setting it up any moment from now and asking all us Albertan Charlie Browns to line up and give it a kick. When we obligingly comply — or compliantly oblige, whatever — she’s going to jerk it away again, just like she always does.

We know it. She knows it. And we keep on doing it. What’s with this, anyway?

Lucy’s real name this year is Alison Redford, and she’s the premier of Alberta. The political football in question is the foolish but nevertheless inexplicably popular idea that we should have fixed election dates like they do in the States — that great exemplar of effective democracy to our immediate south.

Redford is setting it up right now and beckoning us over to give it a kick. So, if you’re one of those deluded souls who think fixed election dates are a fine idea, get ready to fall on your butt!

Now, I’m not talking about the idea that a democratic government should only be allowed to remain in power for a specified period of time without an election. The topic here is merely the notion that the election needs to fall on a specific date, say the first Tuesday in November every fourth year.

According to the idea’s enthusiasts, who one suspects are mostly TV-watchers who haven’t figured out that we have a different system of government on the north side of the 49th Parallel, fixed election dates are somehow more democratic. This supposition is based on the faulty notion that fixing the election day by statute makes it hard for incorrigibly sneaky politicians to manipulate the day the election’s going to happen. This, in turn, is supposed to make it easier to get rid of politicians you don’t like.

I guess that’s why it’s so easy for voters to kick out members of the U.S. Senate … oh, wait, it’s almost impossible for voters to kick out members of the U.S. Senate. Who knew?

The sad fact is, that this idea is based on the perpetual loser’s complaint that somehow the system is biased against him. And notwithstanding the long success of provincial parties like Alberta’s neo-liberal Conservatives and British Columbia’s neo-conservative Liberals (same thing, folks), federal politics out here in Western Canada is steeped in the hard-to-shake feeling that we’re still political losers.

After all, there were all those years when voters in Atlantic Canada, Ontario and Quebec — and even significant parts of the West — just wouldn’t do what our Alberta Conservatives told them to do. Rather than own up to the fact some of their ideas had little appeal outside their region, they came to believe the myth that the system was stacked against them.

So they called for a “Triple-E” Senate, for American style term limits, and fixed election dates — all bad ideas that would make Canada less democratic, rather than more, but which had appeal because of the overwhelming cultural influence of the United States on this part of Canada.

The problem, however, is that whatever the actual merits of fixed election dates may be, they are simply not going to happen — no matter what Alison Redford promises or the Alberta Legislature passes — for two reasons:

Reason No. 1: Our Parliamentary system of government cannot work if you have true fixed election dates.

Our system of government is called “responsible government.” This phrase means that the ministry (that is, the cabinet) is responsible to the Legislature (that is, in Canada’s case to the House of Commons, here in unicameral Alberta to the Legislative Assembly). So if the Legislature votes no confidence in the ministry, the government must fall and either an election must be held or the Crown’s representative (that would be the Governor General or the Lieutenant Governor) must ask the Opposition if it can form a government.

If you don’t know this is the way things work in Canada, you’ve probably been watching too much American TV.

So fixed election dates are simply impossible to legislate or otherwise guarantee in the responsible government system and everyone who is paying attention, and that would include Premier Redford, knows it perfectly well.

Reason No. 2: You can’t change the system in Canada without changing the Constitution and, face it people, that’s just not going to happen, no matter how fine an idea Redford or St. Albert MLA Ken Allred, a loud proponent of the idea, think that would be.

So, really, when all the rhetoric and outlandish claims are dealt with, all you can really do in a Canadian legislature is pass a law that says you really, really should, seriously people, hold your elections on a certain date. And a recommendation in law has all the power and meaning of self-regulation by a private company.

Any law the Alberta Legislature could pass, in other words, means diddly-squat.

Diddly-squat. That’s what happened, of course, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives passed a fixed election law. The instant it was inconvenient to them, in 2008, they threw it over the side. And, really, who wouldn’t have, in their shoes?

Diddly-squat. That was also pretty much the reaction of the B.C. Liberals to their own fixed-election law when it looked like it was going to become inconvenient for them.

Any sitting minority government can force the Opposition to “call the election” by introducing legislation the opposition parties cannot tolerate. And any majority government facing the prospect of defeat later at an assigned time will find an excuse to jump early if there is any chance of success.

In other words, Canadian governments with fixed-election-date laws will only use them if they work for them. Otherwise, they’ll gleefully jerk the football out from under us.

This law is a meaningless waste of time that panders to the ignorance of a significant portion of the Alberta electorate. Some politicians push it, I guess, because it’s better to be known as the MLA who wants fixed-election dates than as the MLA that does precious little for his constituents.

But, really, an intelligent and well-informed person like Premier Redford ought to know better.

This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...